... That now they are in our system we have to charge you for the treatment of them.
Posts by fajensen
1362 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008
Healthcare org with over 100 clinics uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to write medical records
AI, extinction, nuclear war, pandemics ... That's expert open letter bingo
Eating disorder non-profit pulls chatbot for emitting 'harmful advice'
Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 just has this certain Macbook Air about it...
Thursday 25th May 2023 11:30 GMT
I have almost entirely switched over to using Linux and Apple Mac OS on the desktop *because* of 35 years' experience using Microsoft Windows, not despite it.
Exactly how I feel!
When I must use windows "privately", I use it in a virtual machine on my MacBook and I have backups. I know it will eventually screw up when I need it to work! I am sick and tired of the unreliability. Don't get me started on the Microsoft bullshit of re-organising and re-skinning the same old bits of fossilised code into different constellations, branding Brownian movements as innovation.
Latest example:
I have to use Dassault's Solidworks at work. Huge thing, expensive, yet pig-ugly and clunky too (Everything looks like an unclean bastard between OS2 Warp 3 and "Windows ME", maybe they even used Borland C++ anno 2003 to code it?).
Again, to add pain to my "Windows experience" this is a physical windows installation. Windows gets an unskipable upgrade, Upgrade bricks the solidworks component database. Nothing can be done by IT, because something about being out of "Temp-space" - with nothing in C:\Temp (Again, typical windows, the error is never what it says it is) - blocks the installer and they have to delete the whole of windows and rebuild the machine to get the Solidworks installer to work, the next day IT does another installation round because here are some options that should also be installed.
This was an "upgrade", but, Windows is still windows, and will break itself again. Solidworks is still clunky & ugly.
Microsoft promises it's made Teams less confusing and resource hungry
Wednesday 29th March 2023 07:59 GMT
Re: Basic UX problems
nice for them to admit for once that many of the frustrations people experience with using Microsoft products are rooted in basic UX problems.
Hah - They are admitting the minor transgression to divert from the bigger, harder, probably unsolvable, problems.
Work has Office 365. Work want us to use Projectflow. One should think "Oh, well yet another Gannt chart to fiddle with and one can attach "products" to the tasks, which are in The Cloud and there are Ressources to manage and so forth. Only, all of the funtions that one would normally expect in some project management software, they are smeared across Projectflow, Sharepoint, Teams, Tasks and probably some more stuff, that one has to pay, for except we don't. Differnt flows, different look & feel, different naming for the same things .... subtle ways things that appear identical are actually different, like booking a RyanAir ticket without getting dinged for some stupid crap one does not want, only distributed and worse!
The impression one gets is that the challenge each of the Microsoft Product Teams took away from the product initiation meeting twas: "How can we make those other bastards contribution to our product suck the hardest so that everyone can see what idiots they are?".
Working in this environment feels like picking rare coins out of clogged highway restroom toilet. The pay is decent, to get the pay, however ....
Wednesday 29th March 2023 06:29 GMT
Re: "To optimize navigation"
What else does Microsoft have?
The problem with very succesful products, like Windows and Office is that their book value is extremely high.
Somebody coming along with radical innovation, even a quantum leap in usability or performance, that person is not going to get a hero's welcome. Quite the opposite: He/She/Other will be branded "A destroyer of Value" and will be send off to whatever bright, open-spaced, designer-furniture and rare-branded eco coffee, compound that represents the coporate nuclear waste dump and shall forver be given innovative, intelectually stimulating, make-work projects, --- that will somehow never make it into Product!
About 40, when they burn out, they realise and despair.
Europol warns ChatGPT already helping folks commit crimes
Tuesday 28th March 2023 07:47 GMT
if anything it should nake easier to catch the criminals?
Sdaly, to everyone else BUT the plod.
One can have ones shit nicked, point out to the plod that it is tagged with something that gives the location down to +-6 meters on regular consumer equipment - and they still cannot be bothered to investigate and recover the loot. They more or less actively refuse unless one mentions maybe getting some of the boys together and go there. Then one will get some attention from them.
I think that while some police are thick as snot, there is institutional resistance because the police does not yet have "A Process" for investigating crimes involving IT (Everything going to court has to be described and documented in very specific ways or you lose). The may never get there because "IT" is changing "the crime environment" faster than the police can cook up Documented Investigative Workflows, new Forms to fill out, and well as getting the courts used to seing them.
Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools
Thursday 23rd March 2023 13:07 GMT
Re: Rational Reason
It is more likely that they will be assigned an FSB-handler that manages their login credentials and work schedule.
- and, as a special favour, provides the service of avoiding that they or their family & friends does not get into trouble with The Authorities, like being accused of spying, colluding with foreign powers. The kind of inconvenience that can just happen to anyone being in unsupervised contact with the western enemy powers.
Xi, Putin declare intent to rule the world of AI, infosec
Wednesday 22nd March 2023 07:41 GMT
They are old men burning the future for vanity, one thicker than the other: Putins special contribution to the World Domination Plan is to drive the Russian talent out of the country - or off to the trenches in Ukraine. Xi would certainly lend Putin's Russia some engineers in the future - to help with extracting those Chinese ressources.
Budget: UK chip strategy still nowhere to be seen. Money for quantum, AI? Sure
Elon Musk yearns for AI devs to build 'anti-woke' rival ChatGPT bot
Monday 13th March 2023 13:56 GMT
Re: duh, BingBot?
Do they need a version cast in the image of their idols: D Trump; J Peterson; A Tate; rather than them-self.
Obviously. Like stuff grown in petri dishes in a secret guv'mint facility, these folks need to live in their own version of reality to maintain their base-level "anger at everyting"-metabolism. To keep all of that "conservative culture" environment going at a moderate expense, automation is essential. Kinda like we fit a controller onto the microbiological incubators at work so we don't have to adjust the settings all of the time and we don't screw it up because we make a mistake.
US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All
BOFH: Generating a report the Director can show the Board – THIS is what AI was made for
Friday 10th February 2023 11:54 GMT
Re: Basic Business B****cks
If you want to change the mind of such a higher-up, the only two strategies are to suggest their proposed course would be illegal, or to provide another option that is cheaper.
Be prepared to learn that "illegal" has may flavours and nuances:
a) Straight up illegal,
b) Probably illegal,
c) Illegal in some specific context,
Your Quest, should you chose to persuade the leadership, will be to move "what they want to do" from categories "a" or "b" and into "c". You cannot cop out by setting "some specific context" == "if found out".
Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'
Wednesday 8th February 2023 20:00 GMT
Re: But why is this necessary?
Imagine if welfare payments or even private salaries were paid in a form where a certain portion could only be spent on food/housing/energy and another percentage (potentially zero) were permitted to be saved or spent on discretionary items.
These tokens wouldn't be a currency then, money, currency, is fungible, whatever this is supposed to be, is clearly not.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is a morally corrupting influence
Friday 20th January 2023 12:32 GMT
Re: So what...?
Stuff that fails gets forgotten.
No, it doesn't work like that. Failures never really go away, they just bide their time and wait for an opportunity.
Someone always rediscovers it. Then energy and will is put into it. It gets refurbished attracting new funding and branding, a fresh bunch of tribal idiots readily joins up for The Great Cause, and then that old fucking bullshit humanity should be well and proper over by now, comes right back, wrecking misery and havoc all over again.
Most of the Q-storm on SoMe are straight rehash of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" from, what, 1903, with some wankers search-replacing "Jews" with Lizard People to not get into too many legal troubles.
What will happen, once AI makes it cheap enough to do for almost everyone, will be a global "refresh, rebrand, relaunch and disseminate" of every bad idea humanity have ever had in recorded history!
Society can barely handle the Q-nuts and the Trumpers, wielding only dumb-AI, not caring any further than optimising for pageviews and advertising exposure. Smarter AI will optimise for "hurting the right people" instead.
University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?
Monday 2nd January 2023 20:55 GMT
Re: ChatGPT - Hmm
That is pretty impressive, in my opinion.
ChatGPT would do well at Business Writing; "Plagiarism" is just saving time and ressources, "lack of originality" is keeping risks under control, "poor quality" means that we have the proper calibration between The Boss and The Minions skillset (and Boss have something to assert dominance with), and "lack of learning" is self-evident: one needs everyone to just shut up and stay at their station!
If I get unemployed again, it will be the perfect tool for writing the mandatory 2 applications per week needed for benefits :).
China dumps dud chips on Russia, Moscow media moans
Monday 2nd January 2023 20:05 GMT
Re: It's just words
Putin might fall, but I can't see anyone partitioning a country with thousands of nukes.
What about a breakout region that "inherits" a couple of hundred nukes? That could probably be arranged, and after what Russia did to Ukraine, keeping the nukes will be the default "divorce" settlement with Mother Russia!
Miniature nuclear reactors could be the answer to sustainable datacenter growth
Monday 2nd January 2023 19:30 GMT
Re: Wastes...
Is that just theory or are there any working units or prototypes?
It is the very best technology in the sense that it will be many decades before anyone has anything more specific than PowerPoint decks with pictures of shipping containers and some formulae - which means that there are decades to grift money from suckers and the fossil industry.
If SMR's and Molten Salt reactors could be done, they would have been done it in the 1950's when they had both the tech, abundant enthusiasm for everything nuclear and a more relaxed attitude to accidents.
Monday 2nd January 2023 19:22 GMT
Re: Wastes...
since the active elements are in the form of molten salt, it's easy to filter out waste and inject new material... and the recycling of the waste is also easier.
If that is "easier" than whatever they tried to do at The Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant, or THORP, then the state of current, and well known, nuclear tecnology, is even more fucked up than I thought it was!
Instead you are proposing to build a chemical separation plant stuffed with radioactive goo contained by new materials that we don't know how to make yet, with pumps and pipeworks infinitely more reliable and durable than whever is available, because nobody are going in to fix it, not even robots (of course we couod invent some special electronics for them also, since we are in Dreamtime)!?
What did Unix fans learn from the end of Unix workstations?
Wednesday 14th December 2022 12:11 GMT
Re: I'd quite like an X-term
Hummingbird X-Windows software
Oh God, how bad that was!
It was so infuriatingly bad that it drove several people, self included, this was "way back" when there were barely any distributions available. I think there was Slackware and that it was a swine to get working on a 486.
States label TikTok 'a malicious and menacing threat'
Thursday 8th December 2022 17:33 GMT
Agreed but the other First World countries problably don't want to Invade/Control/Dominate the USA
Well, partly because nobody with a grain of sanity wants the bother that goes with it and partly because everyone else are hovering around number 700 or so in terms of millitary expenditure :)
The upset about China (and other pesky foreigners doing pesky stuff) is a growing realisation that the real threat to America is the local "tribals", who very much *do* want to Invade/Control/Dominate all those other people living in the USA, to be "hurting the right people" as they say.
And they are at that point in the horror movie script where the police is tracing the call, and they will trace it to "Inside The House", in this case the republican side of The White House! Maybe they could also trace some of the funding free speech back to Vladimir Putin while they are at it.
This maglev turntable costs more than an average luxury electric car
Biden cuts off China's Yangtze, 30 others from US chipmaking gear
Tuesday 11th October 2022 07:37 GMT
Re: A or B ?
It's a game of probabilities. Assuming that only your own country has the smart people is, well, not very smart.
Everybody does it, though, so it kind of averages out in the end.
I think the problem right now, are the stupid old men trying to take us all back to some Glorios Past (that never existed). I think China made a big mistake with Xi Jinping, because - he is an old fart, he hasn't got the time, he's rushing things and he's rushing in the wrong direction for stupid old-man reasons.
The trajectory China was on before Xi Jinping started his grumpy old fart antics about land, power and control would have made China the leading world power in about 30 years, pretty much unnoticed and uncontested. All people hate being sold to, but, they do love buying - and the idea that Free Trade would blot out the authoritarians, we loved buying that idea, and all that other stuff made only by China!
Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty
Mandiant ‘highly confident’ foreign cyberspies will target US midterm elections
Germany orders Sept 1 shutdown of digital ad displays to save gas
Tuesday 30th August 2022 08:47 GMT
Re: Germany, the country with no natural ressources and now also too little electric power.
Electricity in Germany costs a multiple of what it does in neighbouring France, which has kept its atomic power plants running.
Why is it that nuke-bro's are compelled to lie, even about things that can be easily verified: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/europe-power-spot-prices-rise-as-wind-supply-set-to-fall
Do they think they are convincing anyone that they are persons that it would be safe to have around nuclear technology, are they the kind of dumb-ass drama queens that like Biggly is Better, or are they just value-signalling to their little church?
German baseload power TRDEBD1 for delivery on Wednesday was up 24.2% at 405 euros ($413.26) a megawatt hour (MWh) by 0911 GMT.
The equivalent French price TRFRBD1 gained 15.3% to 559 euros/MWh.
Tuesday 30th August 2022 08:29 GMT
Re: Pointless laws are pointless
Maybe they should, you know, not close all those nuke plants??
"They" being France you mean?
Germany closed their four nuclear plants quite a while ago, while France has quite recently closed half of theirs, nationalised and reconstructed the bankrupt EDF - so that someone can perhaps retain some of the nuclear capacity.
They have 12 plants with corrosion issues and cracks in pipework, that they now seem to have a solution for.
Then they have Flamanville, the never-ready next-generation EPR, with 10 years delay, cost overruns at about 15 billion EUR (so far), the parallel issues on Olkiluoto in Finland, Hinckley Point in the UK and to a lesser extent Taishan in China, casting grave doubts on whether anyone really has the skills to build these plants. "Grave Doubts" meaning: There will be no financing of nuclear plants unless bullet proof government guarantees decades into the future are given.
The French relied on nuclear electricity always being plentiful and available, now it is not so. They have to import their electricity from Germany, at premium prices, which the French government has capped, but, somebody are still picking up the tab so "Markets" don't go hungry: French Taxpayers!
Blaming for ones own inability to keep up with the mandatory scheduled maintainance of ones own nuclear fleet so it doesn't rot away at an inconvenient time, that is just crab mentality.
Nuclear is a dying technology. No use in flogging zombie horse!
77% of security leaders fear we’re in perpetual cyberwar from now on
Tuesday 30th August 2022 07:47 GMT
Re: How many windows users...
shouldn't software notify users of this event before the driver actually runs?
Microsoft made some decent moves in that direction with AppLocker, then immediately regretted it and broke it, the bigger market being in consultancies billing hours for fixing broken crap and promising that future Windows versions will fix the current broken crap.
As things are now, one needs a brain the size of Jupiter to configure it correctly and also a Windows Enterprise box. Once it does work, however, it will be deprecated, The Microsoft way!
Everyone else get to run Snap.Do!
Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban
Friday 26th August 2022 08:49 GMT
If it is so cost effective why are bills going up with a potential doubling of the cap price tomorrow?
That line of thinking went out with Karl Marx and cost+ defense procurement. Today, Markets decide the price, not production prices, and energy companies are very happy indeed about their cost effective production and the inefficient Markets!
Since the 1990's the FIRE-economy rules the world. About 2008, it had a little boo-boo. Some especially gifted "Brain Trust" running global finance decided that it would be good for con-fidence and growff to keep interest rates suppressed and even negative for decades, thereby inflating assets such as stock markets, bonds, real estate, wind farms, solar farms, skating rinks in the desert, water, fishing quoatas, and of course land.
Now, these same people see inflation and they figure that maybe facilitating a few people taking 99.99 of the worlds wealth using Free Credit was maybe going overbord at little, so, they are slowly raising interest rates, assets starts to unwind, as planned.
However, all that money that was created by the asset price inflation doesn't just disappear, instead it flows into different "inflation proof" investments, like food, raw materials and energy.
On top of that mess evolving, we suddenly have the war in Ukraine creating a shock in the market and an immediate shortage of raw materials and energy and of course setting off a feeding-frenzy in "The Market".
*That* hits the energy bills, only Regulation will stop it and things will be really dire before that can happen, corona was only setting the mood.
*) FIRE - Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate.
Thursday 25th August 2022 08:20 GMT
... staffed by a bunch of bozos (which the Japanese aren't,
I think that for any population or group one cares to investigate, 1 in 5 of will be a moron!
The "moron quotient" is quite independent on how the population was selected. Whatever we do, invariably, 20% of ones colleagues will in fact be idiots. My experience in big-science and engineering matches well with those numbers.
In Japan, the grid frequency is 50 Hertz in Eastern Japan (Tokyo, Yokohama and other northern area), and 60 Hertz in Western Japan. They cannot easily transfer power between the regions because the links do not have the capacity so they have more trouble with varying electricity demands and supplies than they should have.
This could be solved with technology that Japan also have (Hitachi makes FACTS, and HVDC links) or standardising, but, they cannot decide to go for one of the frequency standards for whatever, politics, probably, and they won't buy the HVDC links because, probably, it is a lot cheaper to just standardise.
The same happens in Sweden, but for different reasons. The people who own Sweden likes cheap power for their mining and smelters in the North. They get that from hydroelectic power plants. They like to keep it that way so when the electrical market was created, "somehow", no new North-South link capacity was built even though "The Market" should have magicked that up.
Their "solution" is similar, to push for nuclear power in the South, knowing damn well that even if they manage to build this thing, all that "cheap and abundant" power is immediately going to be sucked right up into the EU Markets, while Northern electricy prices stays exactly the same, because the power that cannot be transferred cannot be sold in "The Market".
It takes 15-30 years to build a new nuclear power plant, so that is 15-30 years where "we don't have to do anything inconvenient because The Solution is riiight around the corner, any day now, just these small cracks in some castings."
Delay and distract (and old people, pining for their good old days) is "the game" behind the sudden interest in nuclear power, nobody important cares that it won't work and it cannot work - because of the Morons, who will, inevitably, end up in key positions all over the supply chain, management and in operations.
Thursday 25th August 2022 07:32 GMT
Re: Excellent news
Apparently we have enough "waste" in storage in the UK to supply all our lecky needs for a century
And a pile of it is still sitting in the basement of THORP. One could go and clean it up right now - except we won't - because leaving piles of shit for the grandchildren and taxpayers is just what people will do. Always.
Even IF the technology worked "as it says on the tin", people will soon find ways to skim off the top, defer scheduled maintainance, use dodgy parts and materials instead of the expensive stuff, hire morons for the operations, and suddenly (if it doesn't cook off):
"We" are France - all our Glorious Nuclear Future sitting, stuck, at 0.4 generating capacity due to all manner of problems generally caused by mismanagement and systems decay, ERF going bankrupt and bailed out by the generous taxpayers as always.
Nuclear proponents and communists share the same idea that their garbage ideas can work because This Time we will find the perfect people, the perfect organisation and the perfect tech to run it. And each time it goes to shit, it was because "other people and it wasn't done right"!
Modeling software spins up plans for floating wind turbines
UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs
Monday 22nd August 2022 06:04 GMT
For instance, with critical regulatory and safety agencies like EURATOM,
There is a competive advantage in writing the rules.
The UK specialists were very good at that and well respected for their work too. For example, most of REACH and the rules on recycleable plastics were written by the UK and I know people who work with these things that are not enthusiastic about Germany and France taking over.
Two thirds of DNS queries for IPv6 hosts sent to Chinese resolvers fail, researchers find
Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'
Thursday 18th August 2022 06:05 GMT
Re: Been using the Beta for a couple of weeks
Oh, yes. And the "Missing Locale Bug". The one that always comes up after a few kernel upgrades.
Each time, I think I should maybe try and dig into this for Glory, then I remember enthusiastically digging into why the printer suddenly didn't work and then I let that ancient evil be, less it rises and forces a reinstall from scratch to fix!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
